The Alberto family is suing Toyota Motor Company over this 2008 crash that killed Guadalupe Alberto, 77.Courtesy Photo

FLINT, MI -- A Genesee County judge has ordered Toyota to turn over documents that attorneys say may prove that a faulty sensor
played a role in a car crash that claimed the life of 77-year-old Guadalupe
Alberto.

Attorneys representing Alberto's estate claim that a
sensor in her vehicle may have contained a "tin whisker" -- a small, electrically
conductive outcropping -- that caused her vehicle to accelerate. They are
suing Toyota over the incident.

"There's evidence in this case that tin whiskers are a
possible cause of the acceleration," said West Virginia-based attorney Robert
Lorea, who represents Alberto's estate.

Genesee Circuit Judge Archie Hayman ordered Toyota
Tuesday, Nov. 12, to turn over to Alberto's attorneys any documents it has on tin whiskers in
U.S. and foreign manufactured vehicles.

Toyota's attorneys declined to comment following Hayman's
ruling, but argued in court that they have already turned over many documents
regarding tin whiskers and that Alberto's attorneys were on a fishing
expedition.

The role tin whiskers may have played in Toyota's unintended
acceleration complaints have been a hot button issue nationally. Some have argued that the
small formations that can grow on electroplated tin may have occurred in a
sensor in the vehicle's acceleration system and caused a short circuit that led
to the acceleration.

Attorneys for Alberto's estate said there was such a
formation in an acceleration sensor in Alberto's 2005 Toyota Camry. The sensor
was destroyed when it was being evaluated by a potential witness for Toyota.
Toyota's attorneys claim the sensor was accidentally destroyed when an iPad was
dropped on it during the evaluation.

Alberto's car careened down West Copeman Boulevard in
Flint April 19, 2008, at 80 mph, weaving in and out of traffic before hitting a tree, sending
her car airborne. The car eventually smashed into another tree, hitting it 8
feet off the ground, killing
her instantly.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said in 2011 that
teams from NASA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
concluded that there was no electronics-based cause for the high-speed
acceleration in vehicles.

But the talk of tin whiskers picked up again after a separate
team of NASA scientists published a study that said a tin whisker-induced short
was responsible for the failure of an acceleration sensor in a 2003 Toyota Camry.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, also called for tin whiskers to be looked
into in a letter he wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in July 2012.

Toyota has denied that tin whiskers played any role in
the unintended acceleration cases.

"So-called 'tin whiskers' are not a new phenomenon and do
not represent a mysterious or undetectable problem in a vehicle's electronics,"
Toyota wrote
in a statement following Grassley's letter. "Indeed, no data indicates that
tin whiskers are more prone to occur in Toyota vehicles than any other vehicle
in the marketplace. Further, no one has ever found a single real-world example of tin whiskers
causing an unintended acceleration event, nor have they put forth any evidence
of unintended acceleration occurring in a Toyota vehicle because of tin
whiskers forming inside an accelerator pedal position sensor."